from DarkStar Website "At most, terrestrial men fancied that there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise." .H.G. Wells War of The Worlds Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars, has itself always been considered a rather mysterious object, as has its smaller twin, Deimos. Joseph Shklovskii noted member of the Soviet Academy of science and co-writer with Dr Carl Sagan of 'Intelligent life in the universe', once calculated from the estimated density of the Martian atmosphere and the peculiar "acceleration" of Phobos, that the satellite must be hollow. Could Phobos be a hollowed-out space station of huge proportions? In July 1988, the Russians launched two unmanned satellite probes - Phobos 1 and Phobos 2 - in the direction of Mars, and with the primary intention of investigating the planet's mysterious moon, Phobos. Phobos 1 was unfortunately lost en route two months later, reportedly because of a radio command error. Phobos 2 was also ultimately lost in the most intriguing circumstances, but not before it had beamed back certain images and information from the planet Mars itself. Phobos 2 arrived safely at Mars in January 1989 and entered into an orbit around Mars as the first step at its destination towards its ultimate goal: to transfer to an orbit that the would make it fly almost in tandem with the Martian moonlet called Phobos (hence the spacecrafts name) and explore the moonlet with highly sophisticated equipment that included two packages of instruments to be placed on the moonlet's surface. All went well until Phobos 2 aligned itself with Phobos, the Martian moonlet. Then, on 28th March, the Soviet mission control center acknowledged sudden communication "problems" with the spacecraft; and Tass, the official Soviet news agency, reported that, Deimos - "click" to enlarge "Phobos 2 had failed to communicate with Earth as scheduled after completing an operation yesterday around the Martian moon Phobos. Scientists at mission control have been unable to establish stable radio contact." What had caused the Phobos 2 spacecraft to be lost? According to Boris Bolitsky, science correspondent for Radio Moscow, just before radio contact was lost with Phobos 2, several unusual images were radioed back to Earth, described by the Russian as "Quite remarkable features". A report taken from New Scientist of 8 April 1989, described the following: "The features are either on the Martian surface or in the lower atmosphere. The features are between 20 and 25 kilometers wide and do not resemble any known geological formation. They are spindle - shaped and proving to be intriguing and puzzling." An unusual photo of a thin shadow across mars (below left) was shown on the Russian television segment. Seen on the surface of Mars was a clearly defined dark shape that could indeed be described, as it was in he initial dispatch from Moscow, as a "thin ellipse" (this photo is a still from the Soviet television clip). It was certainly different from the shadow of Phobos recorded eighteen years earlier by Mariner 9. The latter cast a shadow that was a rounded ellipse and fuzzy at the edges, as would be cast by the uneven surface of the moonlet. The 'anomaly' seen in the Phobos 2 transmission was a thin ellipse with very sharp rather than rounded points (the shape is known in the diamond trade as a "marquise") and the edges, rather than being fuzzy, stood out sharply against a kind of halo on the Martian surface. Dr. Becklake described it as "something that is between the spacecraft and Mars, because we can see the Martian surface below it," and stressed that the object was seen by both the optical and the infrared (heat seeking) camera. All these reasons explain why the Soviets have not suggested that the dark, "thin ellipse" might have been a shadow of the moonlet. While the image was held on the screen, Dr. Becklake explained that it was taken as the spacecraft was aligning itself with Phobos (the moonlet). "As the last picture was halfway through," he said, "they [Soviets] saw something that should not be there." The Soviets, he went on to state, have not yet released this last picture, and we wont speculate on what it shows. So what was it that collided or crashed into Phobos 2? Was the space probe shot out of space for "seeing too much"? What does the last secret frame show? Well... Cosmic Conspiracies have managed to track down this elusive last picture (below right). In his careful words to 'Aviation Week and Space Technology', the chairman of the Soviet equivalent of NASA, referred to the last frame, saying, "One image appears to include an odd-shaped object between the spacecraft and Mars." This "highly secret" photo was later given to the Western press by Colonel Dr. Marina Popovich, a Russian astronaut and pilot who has long been interested in UFO's. At a UFO conference in 1991, Popovich gave to certain investigators some interesting information that she "sm...